This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

They say that practice makes perfect, but sometimes the best practice is not on a keyboard.

It's all in your head.

There's a new study shows that the brain takes advantage of the rest periods during

practice to review new skills, a mechanism that facilitates learning.

The work appears in the journal, Cell Reports.

A lot of the skills we learn in life are sequences of individual actions.

Leonardo Cohen of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, or NINDS.

For example, playing a piece of piano music requires pressing individual keys in the correct

sequence with very precise timing.

That level of virtuosity requires a ton of practice and a lot of repetition, but Cohen

says it also requires a certain amount of rest.

We know from previous research that interspersing rest with practice during training is advantageous

for learning a new skill.

In fact, we recently showed that virtually all early skill learning is evidence during

rest rather than during the actual practice.

It's during those intermittent breaks that the brain starts to sew together the individual

movements that make up a seamless piece.

And the question then becomes, how?

To find out, Cohen and his colleagues turn to an imaging technique called Magneto and

Sephilography, or MEG.

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